Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Woman Writer's Fate

Stephen Behrendt

{69} Frankenstein is a woman author's tale of almost
exclusively male activity, a tale whose various parts are all
told by men. Women are conspicuously absent from the main
action; they are significantly displaced (Agatha de Lacey,
Safie) or entirely eliminated (Justine, Elizabeth, and the
Creature's partially constructed mate). The only woman truly
present in the tale is paradoxically not "there" at all:
the unseen, silent auditor/reader Margaret Walton Saville (MWS),
who exists only in Walton's letters. Walton's letters make clear
that Margaret figures into his part of the tale as both
confidante and confessor, much as Walton himself serves Victor
Frankenstein. Indeed, Walton's explanations to Margaret of his
own behavior suggest that he casts her in a role as
sanctifier, whose province it is to hear, understand,
sympathize, and approve (see Letter 2, for instance), rather
in the manner of the roles in which Dostoyevsky later casts Liza
in Notes from Underground and Sonia Marmeladov in
Crime and Punishment. Walton manipulates his sister much
as William Wordsworth
encircles and silences his sister Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey":
the brother's own future viability (which the text explicitly
demands) is to be engineered precisely by the resonance of his
own words in his sister's consciousness (ll. 134-59).

As "silent bearers of ideology" in Western literature and art,
women have traditionally been made "the necessary sacrifice to
male secularity," which finds its expression in materialistic
public activity in a world that cannot -- indeed will not --
accommodate the woman of action.1 Ellen Moers sees in Ann Radcliffe an alternative
to both the intellectual, {70} philosophical woman typified by
Mary Wollstonecraft and
the super-domesticated image of the submissive wife and mother
extolled by earlier eighteenth-century culture. Moers claims
that Radcliffe's vision of female selfhood involved neither the
wholly intellectual nor the traditionally "loving" nurturant
role but rather that of the traveling woman: "the woman who
moves, who acts, who copes with vicissitude and adventure."2 This very
public role of the woman of action fits authors like Mary Darby
Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the many Gothic
heroines who, like Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of
Udolpho, cope exceedingly well with continual reversals of
fortune and circumstance. It is not, however, the model of
experience embraced by Mary Shelley, who, despite her
considerable travels and public activity, wrote in pointedly
gender-specific terms in 1828 that "my sex has
precluded all idea of my fulfilling public employments."3 For modern
readers her comment hints painfully both at the enculturated
tendency of many women of the time -- and today -- to perpetuate
women's oppression by discouraging public roles for women and at
a narrowed and more biologically based rationalization of
reserve on women's part.

In her important 1982 article, Barbara Johnson examines the
troubled relationship among mothering, female authorship, and
autobiography in Frankenstein, revealing some of the ways
Mary Shelley associated authorship with monstrousness, and the
products of authorship with the violent and unpredictable
Creature. Anne Mellor has subsequently extended and refined the
discussion in terms of Shelley's life and other writings.4 My own reading
is informed by their critical insights. I argue further that the
initially well-intentioned and humane Creature resembles the
idealistic author seeking to benefit her or his society, and so,
tragically, does Victor Frankenstein. Both see their desires
frustrated, however, as their intentions are first misunderstood
and then misrepresented by others. Their interlaced histories
thus pose a strong warning to authors -- whether of literary
texts or of cultural texts, such as revolutions -- about the
dangers of creating that which can destroy even its own author.
The author must acknowledge the fact that her or his text's
potential for mischief is at least as great as its potential for
good. Because Frankenstein's embedded lessons about the
hazards of authorship bear particular relevance to the Romantic
woman author, I shall here treat the novel as a touchstone as I
examine some broader issues.

Although Frankenstein is a novel about acts and
actions, it comes to us not in actions but in
reports of actions, almost in the manner of classical
theater, where much of the offstage action is represented only
in verbal reports. The more contemporary parallel lies in Gothic fiction, in which {71}
the violence is often kept offstage and thereby rendered
powerfully imminent, a menace whose physical manifestations are
only barely held in abeyance by a combination of virtue,
fortitude, coincidence, and plain good luck. In
Frankenstein the reports are in fact frequently multilayered: they are reports of
reports. The most heavily layered is Walton's report of Victor's
report of the Creature's report of his self-education and
experiences. Mary Shelley adds to this layering by beginning her
novel in epistolary fashion, with a series of embedded reports
that draw our attention to the writing acts of Walton and, by
extension, to Shelley herself, both as original anonymous author
and as the subsequently public, ex post facto authorial presence
in the 1831 Introduction who reports on the novel's genesis.
Moreover, in adopting the epistolary form of discourse, Walton
adopts a genre long associated with women's writing. Just
as he appropriates woman's procreative activity in creating his
own "Creature," so does he appropriate the ostensibly
uninhibited literary form (the letter form has been called
"spontaneity formalized") that women -- otherwise denied voice
and hence access to male literary culture -- "could practice
without unsexing" themselves.5

To what extent does the nature of Frankenstein as a
construct of words, rather than a direct representation of
actions, embody the dilemma of the woman writer at the beginning
of the nineteenth century? In what ways does the marginalization
of women, their activities, and their perceived cultural worth
figure in Frankenstein's elimination or destruction of
them? And what relation do these questions bear to the
circumstances and the literary productions of other women
writers of the Romantic period? Inherent in Frankenstein
are some telling reflections of the ways in which women figured
in the public world. In Mary Shelley's novel, women are
occasionally the objects of discourse -- most notably
Margaret Saville, who cannot respond (or is at least represented
as not responding), but also Justine and Elizabeth, whose
responses to discourse aimed at them are in each case truncated
by their deaths at the hands (in Elizabeth's case, quite
literally) of the violent system of male authority within which
the narrative is inscribed. When they are the subjects
of discourse, on the other hand, they fare little better, for
every woman of any importance who is spoken of in the main
narrative is likewise destroyed: Victor's mother, Elizabeth,
Justine, and the Creature's mate (who dies before even being
"born"). In the public literary world of the time, the story is
much the same. As objects of discourse, women were continually
reminded of their "proper" and "natural" place in private
familial and public extrafamilial interaction. The woman writer
(who becomes herself an originator of discourse by publishing)
is "repre- {72} sented" within public culture as an object of
discourse when her work is reviewed by the (generally male)
critic. But she is also translated into the subject of
discourse when her literary efforts are indiscriminately
interchanged with, or substituted for, her self -- her
individual person -- within the public discourse of
criticism.

Mary Shelley's first novel demonstrates that men's actions are
typically either overtly destructive and therefore disruptive of
social bonding or simply so thoroughly counterproductive that
they result in paralysis, much as Walton's ship becomes
immobilized in the ice. This message is repeated in one form or
another in her subsequent novels and tales, and it appears in
perhaps its starkest terms in Matilda, where the
psychological and sexual oppressions are so powerful that they
resist language's capacity to record them at all. The writings
of Shelley and others reveal the consequences of the cultural
pressures exerted upon the woman author, pressures whose
cumulative weight often served either to drive women to
misrepresent themselves by adopting the masculinist culture's
literary conventions or to silence them altogether.6 In the case of
Mary Shelley -- daughter of politically radical philosophers,
wife of a particularly notorious radical artist, and member of a
glittering literary circle -- the residue of this enculturated
sense of inferiority is startling. The terrible cost of her
search for personal fulfillment in a permanent, secure
relationship based equally upon affection and intellectual
equality have been documented by her biographers. Sufficiently
telling are two comments from her letters to two women, the
first of whom (Frances Wright [Darusmont]) was herself an active
political and social reformer transplanted in 1818 to America:

[W]omen are . . . per[pet]ually the victims of their
generosity -- & their purer, & more sensitive feelings
render them so much less than men capable of battling the
selfishness, hardness & ingratitude [which] is so often the
return made, for the noblest efforts to benefit others.

In short my belief is -- whether there be sex in souls or not --
that the sex of our material mechanism makes us quite different
creatures -- better though weaker but wanting in the higher
grades of intellect.7

The second remark, in which "weaker" clearly refers to physical
strength and stature, comes from a letter that is unusual even
for Mary Shelley in the violence of its self-deprecation. But
Dorothy Wordsworth expressed her fear of disappointing Coleridge in much the same
terms: "I have not those powers which Coleridge thinks I have --
I know it. My only merits are my devotedness to those I love and
I hope a charity towards all mankind."8 John Stuart Mill expressed the
nature of the dilemma when {73} he wrote in 1861 that "all the
moralities tell [women] that it is the duty of women, and all
the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live
for others, to make complete abnegations of themselves, and to
have no life but in their affections."9 Comments like Shelley's and
Wordsworth's provide compelling evidence of the validity of Mary
Jacobus's much more recent observation that women's attempts to
gain access to a male-dominated culture tend often to produce
feelings of alienation, repression, and division: "a silencing
of the 'feminine,' a loss of woman's inheritance" (27).

Indeed, expressions of self-disgust and self-hatred recur in the
personal, private statements of Mary Shelley and other women who
indulged their ambition (or, like Mary Robinson, Charlotte
Smith, Felicia Hemans, and Shelley herself, their plain
financial need) to enter the public arena of authorship.
Entering explicitly into competition with the dominant caste of
male authors, the woman writer seemed to violate not just social
decorum but also the nature and constitution of her own sex. Not
surprisingly, her efforts generated both anxiety and hostility
among the male literary establishment, particularly when the
woman dared to venture outside genres such as Gothic fiction
that were more or less reserved for the heightened emotionalism
expected of women writers.10 It is instructive to remember that
when Percy Bysshe Shelley composed a review of
Frankenstein in 1818 his language implied that the author
was male (perhaps, as was believed, Shelley himself).11 Although
this may have been yet another instance of Shelley's
exaggerated, chivalric protectiveness toward his wife, the
result was nevertheless to strip her of her authorship, even as
she had been stripped of her early literary efforts in 1814 when
the trunk containing her papers was left behind in Paris and
subsequently vanished.12

I do not mean to minimize the growing impact women had on the
Romantic literary market, either as authors or as readers.13 But for
nearly two centuries their place has been defined largely in
terms of their relation to sentimentalism, which has had the
effect of stereotyping the majority and effectively silencing
the rest. By the later Romantic period it was becoming apparent
that men no longer held quite the stranglehold on the literary
scene that we have generally assumed. While publishing and
criticism remained male-dominated fields, publishers especially
were shrewd enough to understand their markets and to cater to
the apparent tastes of a growing female readership, in part by
employing women authors who addressed that readership.
Nevertheless, the literary woman's activity remained
circumscribed. Although women were free to write the literature
of sentiment and were, in fact, encouraged to do so, the {74}
invitation did not customarily extend to the literature of
science or, for the most part, of philosophy, political science,
or economics. Indeed, the criticism of the would-be intellectual
woman typically turned on assumptions about both the proper
"nature" of women and the attributes that make them desirable to
men, who are still the ultimate "consumers." This comment is
typical: "[T]his woman had utterly thrown off her sex; when
nature recalled it to her, she felt only distaste and tedium;
sentimental love and its sweet emotions came nowhere near the
heart of a woman with pretensions to learning, wit, free
thought, politics, who has a passion for philosophy and longs
for public acclaim. Kind and decent men do not like women of
this sort."14 The woman is Charlotte Corday, the
famous mall-killer; the account, from a Jacobin newspaper of the
time. Such terminology recurs repeatedly in the English press
and in the culture it both reflects and molds, and it suggests
the extent to which the male establishment feared the
"monstrous" advances being made by women. Like other novels
(Smith's Desmond or Wollstonecraft's Maria, for
example) whose rhetorical and thematic threads include the
political, Frankenstein at once trespasses on "forbidden"
territory and at the same time comments on the nature and
consequences of that incursion.

The Romantic reading public's voracious appetite could consume
authors as easily as their works, but their lack of access to
the male-dominated, symbiotic twin industries of publishing and
criticism made women writers particularly vulnerable. When
Joseph Johnson hired Mary Wollstonecraft in 1787, he was taking an
unconventional step, even though his decision was undoubtedly
rooted more in pragmatic economic reasons than in progressive,
gender-sensitive political ones; just back from France, she
offered him both a contact (as well as a translator and editor
familiar with the Continental literary milieu) and an
intelligent author in her own right. Mary Darby Robinson's work
for the Morning Post (which placed her squarely in the
company of -- and partly in competition with -- Coleridge and Southey) offers another
exception to the all-but-universal rule of male dominance. This
overall dominance inevitably lent publishers and critics an
inordinate power to silence the woman writer by denying her
access to an audience or by so characterizing her efforts as to
render them wholly unattractive to the inquisitive reader and
thus to the prospective publisher of any subsequent efforts.
Both of these forces stood poised to strike as soon as the woman
writer overstepped the boundaries of propriety; they stood ready
to step in "the moment she appeared to them as too palpably a
manifestation of that monstrously capricious readership that has
given birth to her" (Ross, Contours, 232).

{75} This is not to say, however that women poets (and women
writers in general) were not acknowledged. Indeed, women poets
seem to have been anthologized more frequently in the nineteenth
century than they have been until recently in the twentieth,
whereas women novelists like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Turner
Smith, Amelia Opie, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, who
began on the margins, achieved a more immediate and
lasting enfranchisement. But the manner of that
acknowledgment of women poets and of that anthologization tells
its own tale. Let us take one example: Frederic Rowton's 1853
edition of The Female Poets of Great Britain: Chronologically
Arranged with Copious Selections and Critical Remarks.15 An
enterprising editor and publisher, Rowton was active in such
liberal causes as the Society for the Abolition of Capital
Punishment. His anthology achieved a wide readership, both in
England and in America, and there is no question that the volume
called attention to women's contributions to England's poetic
heritage. Nevertheless, Rowton's "critical remarks" typify the
narrow post-Romantic characterization of women s writing in
terms analogous to those in which women's "domestic" work was
being characterized at the outset of the Romantic period.
Rowton's comments on Felicia Hemans, for example, are
illustrative:

She seems to me to represent and unite as purely and completely
as any other writer in our literature the peculiar and specific
qualities of the female mind. Her works are to my mind a perfect
embodiment of woman's soul: -- I would say that they are
intensely feminine. The delicacy, the softness, the
pureness, the quick observant vision, the ready sensibility, the
devotedness, the faith of woman's nature find in Mrs. Hemans
their ultra representative. . . . In nothing can one
trace her feminine spirit more strikingly than in her domestic
home-loving ideas. . . . No where, indeed, can
we find a more pure and refined idea of home than that which
pervades Mrs. Hemans's writings on the subject. (Pp. 386-87)

The delicacy that Rowton so admires in Hemans is in fact a
recessive, deferential attitude that is more a critical
overlaying, an interpretive imposition, than an essential
quality of Hemans's verse. Just as female subordinates are kept
in their "place" at the office by being called by first name
(frequently in a diminutive form, at that) by supervisors whom
they are expected to call by formal surname, so too is Hemans
(and many others) "placed" by Rowton's condescending but
nevertheless firmly authoritarian language, shored up by his
"selection" of verse which guarantees that the reader will see
in Hemans precisely what Rowton intends. Interestingly, when H.
T. Tuckerman wrote an introduction for the American edition of
Hemans's Poems that appeared in 1853 (the same year as
Rowton's anthology), he employed many of the same {76} critical
tactics, engaging in a form of "psychic defense" under the guise
of critical appraisal. Such tactics, as Marion Ross has
demonstrated, "enable the critic to perform the crucial cultural
endeavor of putting women in their natural and social place
while ostensibly simply going about the mundane task of literary
criticism" (Contours, 237).

The deferential, self-deprecating introduction or preface was a
familiar literary fixture, whether it was employed by a Wordsworth or a Shelley in offering the
world works that were proposed to be somehow "experimental" or
adopted by a Mary Tighe (as in Psyche, 1805). But while
readers seem to have "seen through" the affected posture when
men employed it, they were more likely to regard that
disclaimer, when women adopted it, not as a mere convention but
rather as a statement of fact. And if the woman author failed to
make the expected apologies, others stood ready to do it for
her. Thus, the editorial introduction addressed "To the Reader"
in later editions of Tighe's Psyche, with Other Poems
assigns gender-driven terms to Tighe -- and Tighe to them: "To
possess strong feelings and amiable affections, and to express
them with a nice discrimination, has been the attribute of many
female writers . . . [but Tighe is] a writer
intimately acquainted with classical literature, and guided by a
taste for real excellence, [who] has delivered in polished
language such sentiments as can tend only to encourage and
improve the best sensations of the human breast."16 Notice that
the praiseworthy features -- nicety, amiability, polish,
sentiment -- are intimately associated with such archetypal
attributes of the Western female as cleanliness, orderliness,
softness, and pliability. Even the exceptional (i.e.,
unfeminine) attributes -- strong feelings, classical learning --
are tempered by their being assigned to the support of
essentially "feminine" concerns, the nurturing of the best
sensations of the human heart chief among them. This sort
of bracketing commentary is the norm for the period, both for
the woman authors themselves and for the (male) interlocutors
who felt compelled to speak for them in order to "introduce"
them to their audiences.

Ironically, the notions of "home-loving" domesticity that
Tighe's publisher, Rowton, and others sought to impose on
women's writing have been succinctly summed up a century and a
half later in -- of all places -- an anthropological study of
dining etiquette:

If "a woman's place is in the home" her place implies all the
"female" characteristics: interiority, quietness, a longing to
nurture, unwillingness to stand forth, and renunciation of the
"male" claims to authority, publicity, loudness, brightness,
sharpness. These qualities have a multitude of practical
applications; for example, they either make a woman altogether
unfit and unwilling to attend feasts, or they influence the way
she behaves while participating in them.17

{77} Substitute "publish" for "attend feasts," and the fit is
nearly perfect. Indeed, according to traditional Western
(especially Anglo-American) etiquette, what could be less
womanly, less feminine, than public-ation, which injects
the woman into a visible world held to be as thoroughly and
exclusively masculine an arena as that to which gentlemen
adjourned after dining for cigars and port?

In exercises like Rowton's, ideology is represented as "natural"
fact, and begging the question is then passed off as
exposition. Elsewhere, Rowton observes of Hemans that "to
passion she is well nigh a stranger." Unlike Byron (who is "indeed, of all
others the poet of passion"), "affection is with her a
serene, radiating principle, mild and ethereal in its nature,
gentle in its attributes, pervading and lasting in its effects"
(p. 388). And Letitia Landon (Maclean), whom Rowton explicitly
compares (favorably) with Byron ("the Byron of our poetesses"
[p. 424]) is nevertheless censured for treating materials and
attitudes for which Byron was even in 1853 routinely praised --
however cautiously. Rowton remarks of Landon's skill at
portraying sorrow:

Persons who knew her intimately say that she was not
naturally sad: that she was all gaiety and cheerfulness: but
there is a mournfulness of soul which is never to be seen on the
cheek or in the eye: and this I believe to have dwelt in Mrs.
Maclean's breast more than in most people's. How else are we to
understand her poetry? We cannot believe her sadness to have
been put on like a player's garb: to have been an affectation,
an unreality: it is too earnest for that. We must suppose that
she felt what she wrote: and if so, her written sadness
was real sadness. (Pp. 426-27)

Rowton's conclusions reveal a built-in ideological inability to
credit the female poet with the imaginative capacity to
create powerful moods or attitudes, a capacity attributed
to a Wordsworth or a Byron without question. The male poet can
create, invent; the female poet can only replicate and
transcribe. Worse, Rowton extrapolates from his own faulty
causal logic a narrowly moralistic (and predictably negative)
literary-critical judgment: "This strong tendency towards
melancholy frequently led Mrs. Maclean into most erroneous views
and sentiments; which, though we may make what excuses we will
for them out of consideration for the author, should be heartily
and honestly condemned for the sake of moral truth" (p. 429).

We are dealing here with codes of behavior, with manners,
considered within the sphere of literary production. Behaviors
that are tolerated among male authors -- even when they
are disapproved -- are intolerable in female authors. Morally
reactionary critical responses to productions like Don Juan, Prometheus Unbound, or
Endymion stemmed at
least in part from a recognition that their authors were writers
of substance and {78} power, whose productions stood to shake up
the conservative establishment on whose stability (and capital)
the critical industry of the time had already come to depend.
Women were writing powerful, socially volatile poetry, too; but
rather than launch a comparable frontal attack on women writers
like Mary Darby Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte
Turner Smith, Letitia Landon, or even Hannah More, gender-driven
criticism adopted the psychologically subtle device of
undermining by misrepresentation, of assessing works in
terms of their adherence to or deviation from presumed standards
of "femininity." The male-dominated publishing industry and its
accompanying critical establishment had, of course, a great
store in preserving, codifying, and enforcing this
construct of "the feminine" in writing, perhaps especially so in
the field of poetry, which was, in the Romantic period, still
the preeminent vehicle for "high" art. If the membership of the
club could not be preserved indefinitely for males only, it
could at least be stratified: separate, lesser rooms in the
clubhouse could be apportioned to women to keep them out of the
way.

Johnson and Mellor have helped us to see that Frankenstein's
Creature shares the situation of Romantic women, marginalized
and spurned by a society to whose patriarchal schemata they fail
to conform. Moreover, the values and sensibilities typically
assigned to women during the Romantic period are not unlike
those that Shelley assigns the Creature, including instinctive
responsiveness to Nature, the impulse toward emotional human
bonding (especially apparent in the deLacey episode), and an
experiential rather than an abstract empirical way of "knowing"
-- all of which are the heritage of eighteenth-century
sentimentalism. In the pursuit of all of these impulses the
Creature is thwarted, both by his irresponsible creator and by
the members of the society that has produced Victor and
countless others like him. That the Creature is not "beautiful"
-- another attribute stereotypically associated with women --
indicates the seemingly deforming nature of nonconformity as
measured by the standards and sensibilities of the dominant
majority. Ironically, as the representative of the masculinist
culture that places such a premium on physical beauty among
women (note especially his descriptions of Elizabeth), Victor
Frankenstein creates a being whose hideousness contravenes any
proper instinctive and loving parental response on his part to
the Creature as "child." He has created that which he abhors, a
situation entirely analogous to what the masculinist social and
political establishment wrought upon women, writers or
otherwise, and with the same consequences: the victim is led to
self-deprecation and ultimately self-destructive behavior.
Likewise, the author who thinks highly enough {79} of her work
to publish it nevertheless compromises herself in publishing
with it self-effacing, apologetic, or temporizing prefaces that
devalue or even destroy the work that follows. This is a
necessary compromise, it would seem, for those who would be
heard at all. But the cost in honesty and self-esteem to the
author is considerable.

Victor renounces the product of his activities when the creative
seeks to usurp the procreative. Hence, physically destroying the
Creature's mate is only an emblem of the real act of devastation
implicit in Victor's actions: the demolition of those who will
not retreat to passive, silent existence on the margins of human
experience. Silent neglect, however, is an equally powerful
response. This fact lends particular significance to a literary
project Mary Shelley proposed in 1830 to John Murray III
and to which he apparently turned a (predictably) deaf ear.
Suggesting topics on which she might write for publication, she
says, "I have thought also of the Lives of Celebrated women --
or a history of Woman -- her position in society & her
influence upon it -- historically considered. [sic] and a
History of Chivalry."18

Did Murray simply assume that the market-driven "buying public"
(despite the very large number of women readers in it)
would be uninterested in a volume of prose about women, perhaps
especially one about "Woman"? The topic itself was certainly not
prohibitively unpopular: Hemans's Records of Woman had
appeared in 1828,
with a second edition the same year and a third in 1830, as
Shelley must have known (although there is no mention of it, nor
of Hemans, in her letters or journals of this period). The
balance (or imbalance) in Mary Shelley's query between the
worthy and promising topic of the position and influence
of women in society and the much "safer" "History of Chivalry"
(in which women might be expected to figure as ornament rather
than as agent) is unintentionally revealing of the cultural bind
from which neither Mary Shelley nor any other woman writer of
her generation could entirely escape. Certainly, when one
considers the sentimental concessions to traditional
expectations about gender and genre that mar Records of
Woman, one cannot help acknowledging the truth of what
Jennifer Breen says about women writers' dilemma of creating in
their works a woman's point of view: they were forced by social
pressure "to conceal the split between what was expected of them
and what they actually felt."19 Hence, most of the women in
Records of Woman are, in fact, reflections of male social
and cultural expectations only slightly displaced from their
customary passive, recessive, nurturant roles to relatively more
aggressive ones whose activity is typically generated by
default, by the disappearance, death, or incapacitation of the
male figure {80} who would otherwise play the active role in the
scenario (e.g., "Arabella Stuart," "The Switzer's Wife," or
"Gertrude," whose subtitle, "Fidelity till Death," says it
all).

One of Frankenstein's lessons is that all creative
activity (whether physically procreative or
aesthetically/scientifically creative) drives individuals into
seclusion and isolation and away from the salutary human
interaction that is the proper objective of all human
action. Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition
details the countersocializing aspect of her own experience as
creative writer. That she chose to include that information and
therefore to publicly detail her physical and psychological
anxiety and her attempt to compete with the literary men who
surrounded her is instructive, for her experience as a woman of
words20 ties
her to contemporaries like Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Taylor,
Mary Robinson, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Smith, as well as to
Dorothy Wordsworth, whose words were repeatedly appropriated by
her brother in poems that for two centuries have blithely been
regarded as "his." That still others, like Felicia Browne
Hemans, unhesitatingly identified themselves by their married
names (e.g., Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Opie, or Mrs. Montolieu)
indicates the extent to which they elected (whether freely or
under cultural coercion) to reduce their actions and their
identities to mere words (denoting marital status and
recessive identity ). What Stuart Curran says specifically of
Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon might be said of many of the
women who were their contemporaries: In addition to the
comfortable domesticity and sentimentality that may be glimpsed
in their work, we can see also "darker strains," which include
"a focus on exile and failure, a celebration of female genius
frustrated, a haunting omnipresence of death."21 This aspect
of women's writing is as troubling today as it was two centuries
ago, and it should not surprise us that intrusive contemporary
commentators, editors, and anthologizers (like Frederic Rowton)
attempted to deny the validity or even the meaningful presence
of that aspect, either explicitly by branding it as subject
matter inappropriate for women, in roundabout fashion by
refusing to credit female authors with adequate imagination or
intellect, or in slightly more covert fashion by calling their
efforts on this front derivative from male models such as
Byron.

Writing literature may be a form of communication, but it is
decidedly not dialogue. Like Margaret Saville, the reader (or
audience) is kept at a distance; functional interactive
discourse with the author is precluded by the nature of the
literary work of art. The one-sidedness of this arrangement is
quite unlike the dialogic nature of the familiar letter (and I
stress the adjective), a genre Mary Shelley seems to have much
enjoyed.22
The {81} act of literary communication -- the writing act
and the production of a public, published text -- distances both
the writer and the reader from the subjective substance that the
text mediates by means of language. In her preface to
Psyche (1805), Mary Tighe presents a view of her work
opposite to the one reflected in Shelley's 1831 reference to her
"hideous progeny": "The author, who dismisses to the public the
darling object of his solitary cares, must be prepared to
consider, with some degree of indifference, the various
receptions it may then meet."23 Whether "hideous progeny" or
"darling object," the fate of the published work is out of its
author's hands, as is the author's private self, which soon
becomes the property of critics and others who appropriate it by
reading it both into and in the literary work, as is evident
from this remark about Mary Darby Robinson's poetry:

Of Mrs. Robinson's general character, it can only be added that
she possessed a sensibility of heart and tenderness of mind
Which very frequently led her to form hasty decisions, while
more mature deliberation would have tended to promote her
interest and worldly comfort; she was liberal even to a fault:
and many of the leading traits of her life will most fully
evince that she was the most disinterested of human beings. As
to her literary character, the following pages, it may be
presumed, will form a sufficient testimony.24

Here again are the terms we have seen applied to Hemans and
Tighe; they include the standard catalog of "feminine" virtues
of softness, tenderness, and pliability, as well as the converse
(and therefore culpable) traits of independence, immaturity,
hastiness, and lack of foresight. The concluding sentence of the
"Preface" makes perfectly clear the writer's rhetorical
strategy: having detailed for the reader a literary life
characterized by failures to behave "properly," both in life and
in print, the writer injects the works themselves ("the
following pages") into this pejorative context. Co-opted into
disapproving of the author's life and life-style, the reader is
invited to carry along that sense of disapprobation while
reading the poetry. It is a classic tactic of reader
manipulation and an unusually effective one, as history affords
us ample opportunities to observe.

To create literary art is ultimately to falsify both the person
and the act -- whether external and immediate or internal
and imaginative -- that motivates the verbal text. It is not
just a matter of producing fading coals, as Percy Bysshe Shelley
suggests in A Defence of Poetry, but rather of burning up
the raw material entirely. In the process the individual self
gets burned up as well, consumed and extinguished. For the woman
writer, no less than for the man, who and what one is
gets superseded in the process of publication by the
words that may represent -- but more {82} likely
misrepresent -- that individual private entity. Fame
devours personhood, as Tennyson's Ulysses reminds us later when
he ironically announces that "I am become a name." In a "man's
world," which is very much what the Romantic era was in England
despite the presence of literary women in it, men are better
able to overcome this dissolution of the self because they are
the principal actors (act-ors) on the public stage, as
well as the controllers of language and other cultural
determinants. But because of their social, political, and
cultural marginalization, women have few resources for
countering the extinguishing of the personal self. When they did
write, as Susan J. Wolfson observes of Dorothy Wordsworth, their
experiences frequently generated in their texts "countertexts
and spectres of defeat."25

Wolfson reminds us that in professing to "detest the idea of
setting myself up as author" ( p. 140) Dorothy Wordsworth
effectively accepted the marginalized and unauthoritative
female role assigned her by the masculinist society epitomized
in her brother and valorized by his public audiences. As journal
keeper and documenter of domestic affairs both personal and
public, rather than self-promoting, publishing author, she
played out the culturally conditioned expectations of woman as
domestic engineer, historical and social housekeeper, and minder
of minor details of order and appearance. Nevertheless, Dorothy
Wordsworth did write, both in prose and in poetry, and even her
characteristic self-deprecating tone cannot entirely hide the
clear strain in her writings of ambition and of longing for a
more authoritative and self-expressive voice.26 Much the
same might be said about Mary Shelley, whose letters are filled
with protestations against public visibility: "There is nothing
I shrink from more fearfully than publicity -- . . .
far from wishing to stand forward to assert myself in any way,
now that I am alone in the world, [I] have but the desire to
wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me."27 Despite her
very considerable oeuvre, she often deprecated both her literary
talent and her intellectual acuity by referring to her writing,
as she once did to John Murray, as "my stupid pen & ink
labors."28

Part of the Romantic woman writer's predicament involves what
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have called the "anxiety of
authorship" -- the woman's radical fear "that she cannot create,
that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of
writing will isolate or destroy her."29 This is a potentially and often an
actually crippling anxiety. And yet this fear need not be
gender-specific to women. Sonia Hofkosh has demonstrated that no
less "male" a male writer than Byron exemplifies the author who
"dreads, as he desires, being read by others -- a reading that
rewrites him and thus compromises his powers of
self-creation."30 The problem is {83} particularly
acute for the woman writer, however, who in the Romantic period
was working with only the bare thread of a literary heritage.
Battling the powerful forces that everywhere reminded her of her
cultural and intellectual marginality and the impropriety of her
artistic aspirations -- forces that fed (and rewarded) timidity
and submissiveness -- the woman writer was very like Mary
Shelley's Creature. This gender-driven cultural stifling both of
experience and of expression lies behind what Mary Jacobus,
among others, sees as the themes of "dumbness and utterance" and
of the powerful quest to fulfill an impossible desire
(Reading Woman, 28).

We do well to catch in the Creature's history a glimpse of the
history of the woman artist during the Romantic period -- and
indeed during much of the history of Western culture. What is at
issue, finally, is the ongoing radical marginalization of the
unconventional, a phenomenon as much political as social and
cultural. The dominant social milieu severs communication with
the Creature because neither its appearance nor its acts conform
to the expectations of that majority culture. The society in
which Frankenstein and Walton alike opt for the isolation of
individual pursuits over the socializing impulses of human
interaction proves to be the real agent in redefining the
parameters of creative activity. Acts are replaced by words,
activity by passivity, responsibility by the irresponsibly
ambivalent, and individuality by abstraction. The person is
dissolved.

Mary Shelley's first major literary project after Percy's death
was The Last Man, which presents itself as a set of
fragmentary papers -- Sibylline leaves -- that trace the
vanishing of an entire civilization in a prolonged universal
cataclysm. Since the indifferent universe of time and history
effectively ends in the skeptical intellectual framework of that
novel, all that remains to lend meaning to mortal existence are
human interaction and human language systems, both of which,
being temporal, are themselves inevitably doomed to end. The
alternative to this desolate picture lies in Shelley's
frequently iterated commitment to "an ethic of cooperation,
mutual dependence, and self-sacrifice" as the means for
salvaging individual and collective dignity and meaning from the
wreckage of temporal human existence. She argued in work after
work that civilization can achieve its full promise only when
"individuals willingly give up their egotistical desires and
ambitions in order to serve the greater good of the
community."31 But this situation leaves the
writer in a particularly precarious position, with her or his
printed words dependent for value on a community of readers to
whom the author is nevertheless a stranger, whose language and
identity is subject to gross misconstruing over time.
Mary Shelley's life of Alfieri offers insight into
her view of authorship, {84} which itself seems to echo both
Wordsworth's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's views: "The author has
something to say. . . . An Author
. . . is a human being whose thoughts do not satisfy
his mind . . . he requires sympathy, a world to
listen, and the echoes of assent. [The author desires] to build
up an enduring monument . . . [and] court the
notoriety which usually attends those who let the public into
the secret of their individual passions or peculiarities."32 But this is
risky business, surely, for even if the assenting voice is loud
and unified, the author still exposes her or his own autonomous
personhood ("individual passions or peculiarities") for public
view and public reading -- or misreading. As the daughter of Wollstonecraft and Godwin and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, she
would have appreciated more than most that the "sympathy" of
which she writes here could be a rare commodity indeed among the
early-nineteenth-century English reading public.

At the same time, though, to write is not just to yield
authority but also to take it, to exercise it. In the
preface composed for the anonymous first edition of
Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley claims that the author has gone
beyond what Erasmus Darwin
and other speculative physiologists have postulated about the
nature of life and "the elementary principles of human nature."
Indeed, the author is presented as having surpassed not only
these scientists but also other culturally ensconced male
literary luminaries, including Homer, the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as the two
"friends" to whose conversations the story is said to owe. In
her own 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley
pointedly reminds us that
her story originated with a set of conversations between Percy
Bysshe Shelley and Byron to which she was essentially a silent
auditor. Yet hers is the story that was completed
and published and that became sufficiently popular
to demand republication. Making her claim of authorship
explicit, Mary Shelley in the process claims possession not only
of the novel's language but also of the material -- the
apparently unremittingly male material -- of its subject
matter. Moreover, the new introduction constitutes a gesture of
authority by which her own authorial voice supersedes the
ventriloquistic voice of her dead husband in the preface. By
1831 she had, after all, survived both Shelley and Byron, and
the popularity of her novel had far exceeded that of her
husband's works and had rivaled and in some quarters even
surpassed that of Byron's.

The Last Man extends some of the issues I have already
raised in terms of Frankenstein. Is the author's role
(whether the author be female or male) merely to record the real
or invented acts of others? That is, after all, what Mary
Shelley turned to in her later years when she wrote the {85}
lives of eminent men. The historian
characteristically steps out of the history she or he
writes, functioning as nameless, invisible recorder, although
even in the best of cases an element of fiction enters -- or is
inserted -- into the writing of history. This ostensibly
detached role appears to have become increasingly attractive to
Mary Shelley, who in 1834, while working on
her contributions to the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary
and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, wrote at
length about her imagination's fleeting visitations and
suggested that, as Wordsworth wrote in the "Intimations" ode,
the years that bring the philosophic mind provide recompense
(though not necessarily so "abundant" as the poet regards it in
"Tintern Abbey") for the
imagination's fading: "I hope nothing & my imagination is
dormant -- She awakes by fits & starts; but often I am left
alone (fatal word) even by her. My occupation at present
somewhat supplies her place -- & my life & reason have
been saved by these "Lives" -- Yes -- let the lonely be occupied
-- it is the only cure. "33

And yet is not this consuming indulgence in words both the goal
and the supermarginalizing consequence of authorship generally
-- to be reduced to words, to be captured, "pictured,"
and read not as person but as textual construct, as a sort of
shadow existence, a phantasm of the reader's own distorting
imagination?

The author constantly runs the risk of being made into a fiction
by the reader who formulates or extrapolates the author from the
text. The woman author is "read" within a system of culturally
encoded patriarchal authority over which she has virtually no
control but within which she is expected to express herself. She
is thus deprived at once of subjectivity, creativity, and
autonomy. The assessment not just of Romantic women's writing
but also of the cultural and intellectual position of the woman
writer in general underscores the urgency of Annette Kolodny's
observation that what unites and invigorates feminist criticism
is neither dogma nor method but rather "an acute and impassioned
attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male
structures of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our
literary inheritance."34 Worst danger of all, one runs the
risk of becoming an accomplice to the substitutional
fictionalization of the "real" (the actual, autonomous,
personal, and historical individual) self by the very act of
writing. For the text that results from that act contains the
self that the reader may reformulate and reconstruct in a living
lie that reflects not the author but the reader, who has,
in the act of reading her, appropriated her and torn her to
pieces, much as Victor Frankenstein first assembles and then
tears to pieces the Creature's mate.

Virginia Woolf suggested that George Eliot's decision to combine
{86} womanhood and writing was very costly indeed; as Mary
Jacobus observes, it was a mortally significant decision that
entailed "the sacrifice not only of happiness, but of life
itself" (Reading Woman, 29). Women writers are
particularly sensitive to the conflict between the "domesticity"
that society expects of them and their own authorial aspirations
for public fame, Marlon Ross writes, precisely because "the
conflict is so palpable in their private lives and in their
poetic careers" (Contours, 289). Mary Shelley understood
the personal cost of authorship, writing of it to Trelawny that "I know too
well that that excitement is the parent of pain rather than
pleasure."35
Writing, especially for publication, is an act of society, of
civilization: a surrender of the autonomous self and identity
to, and ostensibly on behalf of, the collective public. But as
Rousseau had foreseen,
the impulse toward formal civilization brings with it a radical
reduction of one's options and, for the writer, "an enclosure
within the prison-house of language" (Mellor, Mary
Shelley, 50). One becomes
what one writes, to paraphrase Blake, even as one writes what
one is. In this endlessly revolving cycle one becomes imprisoned
in temporality and typicality; one is reduced, finally, to a
cipher, to a sheaf of papers, to reports of actions -- or to
reports of ideas that purport to be actions.

Like her contemporaries, Mary Shelley wrestled with the assault
upon the personal ego inherent in the public response to one's
formal writing. She wrote -- after 1822 primarily because
she had to, to support herself and her son -- and only
occasionally did she allow herself to stare back at the
potential uselessness of it all: "What folly is it in me to
write trash nobody will read -- . . . I am -- But all
my many pages -- future waste paper -- surely I am a fool--."36 At more
optimistic and self-assured moments she could at least find
consolation in the activity of writing, even if it was
merely a matter of filling the hours.

That Walton finally redirects his ship toward the south (and
symbolically toward warmth and society) at the conclusion of
Frankenstein might indicate that he has learned from his
experience, were it not that Walton does not choose freely in
the matter but rather accedes in the face of a mutiny. I suggest
that the practical struggle to be true to oneself and to one's
ideals and aspirations -- for the woman writer as for the man
Arctic explorer -- inevitably involves compromise and with it
the reduction and subjection of one's essential self to a report
embedded in words. Literature traditionally introduces us not to
authors but to their words, the words by which they represent
impressions of their ideas and of the "selves" in which they
live their days. Living with the diminished self whose record is
the journal of papers that makes up the novel will haunt {87}
Walton, even as the Creature haunts the obsessive-compulsive
Victor Frankenstein (who is no victor at all but the ultimate
cosmic loser). But so too must the writer -- woman or man --
inevitably be haunted by the specter of herself or himself
reduced to a cipher, to a construct of words, the work itself
becoming a "hideous progeny" that dissolves the author as self,
as living, acting entity. Whatever the inherent formal value of
the literary product, it nevertheless both mutilates and
misrepresents its author. In this sense, among others, it seems
to me entirely valid to read in Frankenstein, as in much
of Romantic women's writing, the enigmatic warning that
creativity may be hazardous to one's health -- indeed to one's
entire existence.

6. Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic
Theory (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 161. Mellor writes
that "that unique phenomenon envisioned by Mary Wollstonecraft,
the wife as the lifelong intellectual equal and companion of her
husband, does not exist in the world of nineteenth-century
Europe experienced by Mary Shelley" ("Possessing Nature: The
Female in Frankenstein," in Romanticism and
Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor [Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988], 223).

9. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of
Women, ed. Sue Mansfield (Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM
Publishing, 1980), 15. Mill's essay was written in 1861 and
published in 1869.

10. See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the
Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Mellor, Mary
Shelley, 56.

11. Percy Bysshe Shelley's review may have been
intended for Leigh Hunt's Examiner. It did not appear
until Thomas Medwin published it in The Atheneum in
1832.

15. This volume, which is readily available in
a facsimile edited by Marilyn Williamson (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1981), typifies the woman writer's treatment
by the (male) Victorian anthologizer. Parenthetical page
citations in this portion of my discussion refer to this
facsimile.

20. This is, in fact, the picture often painted
of Mary Shelley: "Mary was never a woman of action. Her pursuits
were intellectual, her pleasure domestic" (Jane Dunn, Moon in
Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley [London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1978], 278).

22.. As Betty T. Bennett's three volumes of
Shelley's letters amply demonstrate, she was an avid letter
writer, and the style of those letters is richly interactive,
inviting a variety of kinds of response from her
correspondents. Even in letters from the years immediately
following Percy Bysshe Shelley's death, letters in which
postured self-pity mingles with spontaneous expressions of
genuine misery, the correspondent is never shut off from
communication or from what Shelley clearly structures as
an ongoing dialogue.

26. The painful ambivalences about ambition,
ability, and gender-related expectations that surface so
frequently in what Dorothy Wordsworth's writings tell us about
herself, her situation, and the life she led have at last been
addressed in a number of sympathetic revisionist studies. See
esp. Wolfson, "Individual in {280} Community," Margaret Homans,
Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily
Bronte, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1980); and Susan M. Levin, Dorothy
Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1987).

34. Annette Kolodny, "Dancing through the
Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and
Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," in The New
Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory,
ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 162.